Margo

You bet. I just put the recipe in Recipe Gullet. They're butter cookies, not at all fussy to make, especially since I got a teaspoon-size portioner from Baker's Catalogue. They were one of my favorites when my grandmother made them. I doubled the lemon zest from the 1 T she called for, so you really taste it, and this year I used double-strength vanilla--so they're less delicate than I remember, and I guess now they're "mine."

Frosted Lemon Balls This is a recipe I inherited from my grandmother, Sylvia Rehder Witherell. I suspect that it came from the Fannie Farmer Cookbook, or Joy of Cooking, as so many of her recipes did. But for me, it's one of my favorite "Oma's cookies." Yields 7 dozen. 3 c flour 1-1/2 c sugar 1 tsp baking powder 2 T grated lemon rind (plus 1 tsp., see below) 1/2 tsp salt 8 oz unsalted butter 1 tsp vanilla extract 2 eggs 1/4 c water 2-1/4 c sifted confectioners sugar 1 tsp grated lemon rind finely chopped nuts, optional Preheat oven to 375 deg. F. Sift together flour, baking powder, and salt. Cream butter and sugar till light. Beat in 1 T lemon rind and vanilla. Blend in eggs, then flour mixture. Drop by teaspoons onto parchment-lined baking sheet. Bake 10-12 minutes till edges lightly brown. Cool on racks. When completely cool, dip tops in lemon icing (below) and sprinkle with finely chopped nuts. Lemon Icing: Heat 1/4 C water to boiling. Remove from heat. Stir in 2 1/4 C sifted confectioners sugar. Blend in 1 tsp. grated lemon rind. Keep icing warm while dipping cookies. Keywords: Cookie, Christmas ( RG2058 )

I just made a resolution to bake more cookies in 2008. Can I hang with you guys? My grandmother gave me a box of her recipies when I got married, including her Christmas cookie standards. So every year, I make a bunch and send them out to family. My father starts asking about them soon after Thanksgiving, and if he's quick enough on the turnaround I'll refill his tin. These show up every year: Springerle (when Oma died, I inherited her springerle rolling pin) Lebkuchen rounds Frosted Lemon Balls ("Calvin Coolidge's favorite!" says the recipe) Danish Pfeffernuesse (decorated with an icing I found in a Penzey's catalogue a few years ago) Plus every year I try to add something new. This year it was from Fine Cooking #75 (two years old but new to me), rugelach and cardamom palmiers made with the same cream cheese dough. These are terrific, great taste and looks without too much effort. OK, one more round of baking to go!

I will bake more cookies. I will find out for myself whether making ganache is as easy as everyone says, and if so, I will make my own chocolate truffles. And to balance those two, I will get back in the habit of making a salad to go with supper. (re. the dressing query above: crush a clove of garlic into a bowl, add a dollop of Dijon, add olive oil and red wine vinegar in a proportion you like, and whisk to combine. Salt and pepper to taste. I used to make this all the time. It even keeps a day or two--or longer, I cannot lie--in the fridge. You can get fancy and mince shallot instead of the garlic.)

A Christmas story. We hung gingerbread cookies on the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve, then went to church. Came home a few hours later to find the lower row of cookies gone--just ribbons around the branches--and the next row up was about half-devoured, Santas missing legs, gingerbread men gone from the waist down... Our dog Mandy had found a snack, and not a bulb or shiny ball was out of place. She pushed her luck another year, when we came home to find the tree tipped over and all the cookies within reach gone. Or half-gone. (What a dog she was. She had a daily round, visiting the neighbors for handouts. Oh, too busy to come to the door? I'll help myself to the cold buffet that is your garbage can.)

Gee, thanks, Margo! You are very kind to suggest that but I don't come close in knowledge or street cred to claim the honor. The above dish is a spanish inspired dish anyway. We need a regional ingredient combination or method... hopefully without using blueberries. Say, if you are buying your seafood in Burtlington, do you mind asking if they plan to carry Gulf of Maine shrimp? I remember Rays on North street loved bargains, then there were those guys at the bottom of Battery Street. Shanty Fish Market used to be my favorite when I lived in Burlap. I'd love to see a report if you have the chance. ← Will do. Price Chopper in South Burlington had them last year--I caught the end of the season there. I'm loving all the pictures--Peter, the roe!

I nominate you! Thanks to your touting the glory that is Maine shrimp, I've discovered a new seasonal treat.

That is a chocolate soil...which by the way was salty. And the half-fork is lovingly called a spork in the US, and this one is my prized bamboo sporks. ← Yabbut... What is chocolate soil? It sounds regrettable from the get-go.

My husband! haha (I'll go away now.) Let the serious discussion begin.

My husband and I ate at APDC last night--a long-delayed birthday present. It was worth the wait! First of all, props to Eugenia, the waitress last night. As English-speakers with limited menu French, and with APDC's terse menu descriptions ("PDC's Happy Pork Chop," anyone?), we had lots of questions. At one point, when Eugenia described that pork chop--double-thick, roasted in the wood oven, on a bed of mashed potatoes, with caramelized onions (where she gestured gallically)--my mouth watered, literally. Her enthusiasm for the menu was absolutely infectious. We're more confident in our preferences in wine than our ability to pick it off a wine list, and she steered us to a great choice at the low end of the per-glass price range. So I can't say enough good about her, and we tipped accordingly but she also deserves public recognition. The rest of the staff could not have been more charming. It's a great team. We ordered a couple of crosmequis foie gras, deep-fried foie gras dumplings that we were instructed to eat in one bite, for "an explosion of foie gras in your mouth." It was just that, and a great way to begin our meal. We also had to try the "pork rinds," hot and salty in a paper cone. At this point, the very good bread arrived, as well. I ordered cassoulet, which had the usual suspects: the world's best garlic sausage, a confit duck leg, and a piece of smoked pork belly (I'm pretty sure). My husband had had duck on his mind all day, and ordered duck breast with mushroom sauce--here the bread was particularly welcome, because the sauce was rich and delicious. We had room to share a molten chocolate cake (not the famous pudding chomeur because our minds were fixed on chocolate). As we looked around, everyone looked delighted to be there. The place was packed and the waitstaff and hostesses were amazing, gracefully making sure a festive spirit prevailed. I don't know how often APDC changes its menu covers, or if this is a regular thing. Canned tomatoes were advertised on the cover at $C5.75 per quart, with a drawing of Chef Picard watering a tomato vine with a kind of grumpy expression, and an ecstatic pig next to him. It cracked us up, because my husband recently spent about three weekends turning his tomato yield into sauce after having planted three vines in hopes of endless sliced tomatoes all summer. Hopes which came to naught but sauce with the sun and rain coming at suboptimum times. Since we therefore have enough of our own damn sauce, we couldn't help Picard unload his. But we felt an immediate kinship which the food utterly confirmed.

Pre-skewered uncooked shrimp? Pre-skewered uncooked kabobs? Beef, onion, and pepper pieces touching each other for who knows how long in the grocery "butcher" case just grosses me out. "Stew meat" = unevenly-sized pieces of who knows what end of the cow. Cutting up a piece of chuck is usually less expensive and you know what you're getting.

I'm really glad you raised the servant issue, too, Rachel. And Sandy, there's been some good scholarship on the changing shape of domestic life. More Work for Mother, by Ruth Schwartz, brings out the irony of how dishwashers and other convenient appliances increased the US woman-of-the-house's chores, because (1) she no longer hired servants now that she had these machines to do the jobs "for" her; and (2) standards of "good housekeeping" changed. Back to Rachel, though--this has been such a fascinating blog. Mexico has such a rich culture, I look forward to reading more of your insights into it.

Please, Peter, you've shown us your fridge and pantry: what ingredients could you be missing?! Thanks for blogging, you have such an engaging "voice" and it's a great tour of your corner of Thailand.

Heresy==> Don't polish your copper. I don't. Mine has a dull patina that seems stable--that is, it hasn't gotten darker and darker and hasn't built up in thickness. I could bring it back to shiny with a little salt and vinegar. But it doesn't bother me. And it doesn't affect the performance of the pan.

I keep a running index as a Word document on my computer. Each magazine gets its own: Saveur, Fine Cooking, and Cook's Illustrated (which I no longer subscribe to, but keep the old issues around). As the current issue comes in, I write the recipe names, volume number, and page into the alphabetical list. Sometimes I get fancy and cross-reference, sometimes I just add the new vol/page to an existing heading (roast chicken, for example, has about a dozen variations in the Fine Cooking index). Sometimes I'm really anal and index everything, sometimes I just put in things I'm likely to try or want to find again. It's kind of a pain to keep up, but it seems like most of my new recipes come from Fine Cooking, so it's worth it in the end. The bookshelf space is becoming a problem, maybe, but I always end up paging through and enjoying whatever old issue I've unearthed.

I love cabbage soup, with potatoes, white beans, carrots, onions, and a pork product. So I made a pot on Sunday and put it in the fridge to have later in the week as an easy supper. My question is this: when I opened the lid of the cold soup the next day, it smelled decidedly...rank. But when I heated it, it smelled delicious again. How come? Theories welcome, and feel free to answer the tangentially related question, why don't roasted, browned--that is, well-done--Brussels sprouts not have that "bad" cabbage-y smell, and well-done boiled ones do?

I found the Times article frustrating in the lack of real information--it seemed more of a "one side, the other side" report. Here's one example where I'd like more info: Now I get, and agree with, exactly what she's saying about knowing your supplier and the accountability of a short food chain. But my question is borne of true ignorance and I'd like to know: how can one know that a pail of raw milk isn't harboring listeria, or a similar pathogen? Is it a matter of healthy cows, sterile buckets, safe handling...?

Specify the stories, Fabby, so we can see. I'll give it a shot. (Ha, ha, I just hit the wrong letter and wrote "shit" instead of "shot". A fine morning it is. ) ← All I meant was, the pieces I'm seeing are coming out of agricultural regions. I can do more investigating myself, and have. I don't trust things when I can't find out who is backing the "studies." ← Here are some quotes from an editorial this past Monday in the St. Albans (VT) Messenger (which isn't available on-line as best I can tell). He's riffing off (Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards' wife) Elizabeth Edwards' comment that as her family was going to be eating local, she'd likely never buy a tangerine again: He continues by touting buying local for the freshness and taste, and because it supports the local community of farmers. He points out that we've been conditioned to appreciate food that's cheap but less tasty. The editorial is positive in the end, and points to the fact that small measures are also worthwhile: I think the point about surplus food in underpopulated areas, and the 10 percent solution are constructive complications in this discussion.

The "3" is silent, right? So cute. Mark, this blog is fantastic. I had Chufi's just before my first trip to A'dam in June, and now yours right after. So much I missed, so many reasons to return!

Do you have to cook together? There are many options, obviously, about meal prep arrangements--all the responses so far have had at least one, sometimes more! Why do you want to cook together? If your partner gets home at 7:30 and likes to chill until 9, it may be best if you just take on dinner, and let him participate at another time. Big cooking baking projects on weekends, brunch/breakfast, etc. When I got married, I had been on my own for 5 years (we didn't live together, and I went away to grad school for two years before we finally got hitched). Plus, I was a vegetarian with what I considered adventurous tastes for heat and spices, and he was an Ohio-raised carnivore. Since I was still in graduate school when we got married, and he was working full-time, it only made sense for me to cook dinner. I love to cook. I was home earlier and had a flexible schedule. (During the dissertation-writing process, lots of baking went on, too, but that's another story.) He happily did the dishes. (But I had to get over my anal-rententive expectation that they'd be done the same night. He preferred to do them in the morning--so I made a point not to go into the kitchen until they were done.) That's still basically the way it works. But, he wasn't satisfied with a veggie diet, and I wasn't happy with him supplementing my dinners with take-out or tv-dinners. He wasn't happy just adding a side of meat to whatever I had planned. So I decided we could stop having that argument, and became an omnivore. I resented it for a while, sure, but I am so over that now. Then, I had to learn to cook meat, and my husband stepped in to help me. Plus, by then we had a grill and he contributed to making dinner by cooking outside. And finally, by chance, I found the Cookbook That Changed My Life and Saved My Marriage: Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby's Big Flavors of the Hot Sun. No kidding. It taught me to cook meat, opened my husband to more exotic flavors by way of salsas and rubs that could be applied lightly or liberally, and I literally cooked through it for about a year. So, blah blah, TMI. But be open to changing roles, be flexible, and think about what it is you want to get out of this shared kitchen thing.

Fish chowda, oyster stew... I haven't had Bush's brand baked beans, but they do seem to be a natal taste for New Englanders. (Of which I am one--but my natal taste is for mom's home-made.) With the beans, you should have steamed brown bread. James Beard has a recipe in the American Cookery mentioned up-thread, and I would bet so does Fannie Farmer. And, conveniently, Bush's makes a canned version, too. Which is funny and appropriate at once, since in the days when coffee came in one-pound cans, those were the preferred steaming vessel.

You are an angel, Miz Ducky. When my grandmother wasn't using Joy, she used the Fannie Farmer cookbook. A New England favorite. Will he eat other fish--pan-fried cod, haddock, etc.?

I like these folks: Hatch Chile Express The fresh product will appear once it's available. I believe they sell by the 25# box.

Ha ha! Britney Spears has a restaurant in New York! Who knew? Edited: But she doesn't claim to be a chef. Never mind.

Hi Dante--I'd like to nominate you for a food blog. Your living situation sounds cool. Yeah, yeah, it's the one-of-each Asian noodle collections, the array of dried spices for a dozen different ethnic cuisines, the United Nations of hot sauces, the canned foods from all countries that fill pantries nowadays. I know that's what eventually filled my Chicago apartment pantry when I lived there over the course of five years or so. That was one great pantry. It had three big built-in drawers and shelves deep enough to accommodate big bins, stockpots, and a lazy susan for all those little bottles and jars. The fridge lived there, too. (There was also a linen closet in the hallway and a built-in glass-front breakfront in the dining room. Fabulous 20s-era apartment in Rogers Park. I think the landlord trashed I mean modernized by removing all that period detail--storage space--when we moved out.)